


Sing, O Muse

by Avelera



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Greek and Roman Mythology, The Iliad - Homer, The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mythology, Canon Compliant, Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Spoilers, M/M, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-01
Updated: 2017-03-05
Packaged: 2018-02-03 01:25:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1726121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Avelera/pseuds/Avelera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Steve and Bucky are the reincarnations of Achilles and Patroclus, and the only thing worse than history repeating itself is when it doesn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Styx

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [Sing, O Muse](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7087264) by [hamLock](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hamLock/pseuds/hamLock)



> Special thanks to Lindoreda for the beta work! All remaining errors are my own. 
> 
> This fic is primarily based on "The Song of Achilles" by Madeline Miller, however a basic understanding of mythology and/or "The Iliad" should suffice if you have not read that (excellent) work.

_Of Peleus' son, Achilles, sing, O Muse,_  
_The vengeance, deep and deadly; whence to Greece_  
_Unnumbered ills arose; which many a soul_  
_Of mighty warriors to the viewless shades_  
_Untimely sent; they on the battle plain_  
_Unburied lay, a prey to rav'ning dogs_

Homer - The Iliad, Book I

* * *

_Acheron. Styx. Cocytus. Phlegethon. Lethe._

The five rivers of the Underworld. None may enter or leave save through their waters.

Patroclus knew the day he must move on. Achilles trailed behind him as he approached Lethe, the river of forgetfulness that served as the passage back into life, away from the babbling shades of the Underworld. Souls were given a choice before they passed on; equal in measure to the life they have lived. A poor but virtuous man may become rich in his next life, a power-hungry king may know the life of a beggar, a woman who died young may know the fullness of old age. The Fates gave with one hand and took with the other, and no life was complete in itself.

Patroclus heard the Fates as he bent his lips to the water. Achilles was behind him, silent and golden, but Patroclus did not think he heard them, for he did not stir when their voices filled the air with the rattle of dry leaves.

_Son of kings, warrior, most renowned of beloveds, what is your wish..._

Patroclus stilled. The water flowed like molten glass beneath his lips. He saw his own hazy reflection within it, the blurred lines of the dead. No breath stirred its surface. 

_King or pauper, virgin or wife, man, woman, dead at birth and returned to the shades, what is your wish..._

"I may choose anything?" Patroclus said, and at this Achilles shifted. Patroclus did not dare turn his attention from the Fates, but he saw concern in the set of Achilles' shoulders, in the tilt of his head. He did not understand. It could be said of both of them.

_Those with such fame as yours may request much, beloved of the gods. Beware._

Of course. The gods only gave mortals choice as a length of rope to hang themselves. To ask much, to demonstrate hubris, was to invite their attention, and attention turned easily to wrath. Better to go unnoticed, if one wished for a peaceful life. 

His gaze drifted back, inevitably, to Achilles. Alertness ran through his golden frame, as though he might listen to Patroclus's audience with the Fates, but the twist of frustration across his lips said he still could not.

"Him," Patroclus said. It was the only answer that had ever mattered, in life or death. "To be with him, that is all I wish. He is half of my soul, and I will not suffer life without him."

_But in what capacity will you take him? Speak. Many wish to revisit those they knew. Would you be his master? Would you bend him to your will, or chain him to your side? Would you be his death?_

"Never!" he choked out. "I wish to protect him, to be by his side for however long he may live. Not to be left alone in this world by his passing, or him by mine. Not again. I want..." his breath caught in his throat, knowing the fearsome extent of what he asked, knowing that it was forbidden, "I want to remember him."

There was a pause, as if the Fates themselves were taken aback.

_You ask more than you know. There will be a price._

"Keep your word, and I will bear it." 

_We always keep our word, even when it seems we do not. Your wish is granted. Go now, but take only a drop of the water._

Patroclus' eyes widened, lips stopped less than an inch from the glassy surface.

_Thus do we keep our bargains. You will know him when you see him. To have knowledge before then would drive you mad._

He nodded in understanding as he drew back. To have the memories of being a man while still an infant would drive anyone mad. Instead he cupped his hands and dipped them in, then pressed them to his lips. He felt a chill deeper than winter, than the ice that bound the world itself. It touched his tongue, and the cold was like an explosion within him, tearing through him, rending memory. A final thought occurred and he recoiled from the stream, crying out, "But when will I see him again?" 

_Fear not. He will be close behind._

Patroclus closed his eyes and nodded with relief. The water trickled from his hands. Memories were crumbling like sandcastles within his mind: his father, the ships, the shine of Hector's eyes as he thrust his bronze spear into Patroclus' chest. Death. Darkness pressed around him, and it was the darkness of the womb, the distant thud of a heartbeat.

Still, he heard one last time Achilles' voice from beyond the veil of death. His answer to the Fates' question, what he wished to be in the next life. 

_"Not a killer. Only… a good man."_

* * *

A flash of gold. That was Bucky's first memory of Steve. He'd heard the fighting from the street, the high pitch cries of children's voices that only sounded like laughter if you weren't listening. There was a grunt beneath it, and a clatter as something heavy hit the tin trash cans. Bucky ducked into the alley, not sure why he did so. He could scrap with the best of them, but it didn't mean he went looking for fights.

There were four boys his age, twelve years old at most, their bodies not yet broadened into adolescence. They were small, slight, but not as much as their target . Bucky saw a flash of gold from amongst the rubbish bins, watched the scrawniest kid he's ever seen in his life struggle to his feet. His fists were ready, there was blood streaming from his nose and rage in his eyes. It awakened in Bucky an answering fire, and he came swinging into the fray. A nose cracked beneath his fist, and he heard the other boys squawk in alarm as they scattered. They weren't prepared for their victim to have friends. The boy Bucky had punched wailed as he clutched his nose. They were only children after all, caught by surprise, rocked back on their heels.

Bucky could have done more, but somewhere in his mind a memory was growing, like a flower poking free of the snow. It blossomed red: a boy's skull shattered upon the ground, dice lying forgotten, and sick terror twisting in his belly. He ignored the other kids as they ran out of the alley, and reached out a hand to the small boy.

"I had 'em on the ropes," the boy said, and wiped the back of his hand over his mouth. It came away bloody. There was no resentment in his voice, but there was _something_ more. He was testing Bucky. 

"Sure you did," Bucky said, grinning back. The blond boy took his hand and shook it. 

"Steve Rogers."

"James Buchanan Barnes. Friends call me Bucky." 

"Bucky," Steve repeated, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to assume they were friends now. "Thanks for the help back there."

"Any time," he said back, and it was Patroclus who spoke.

Like Athena sprung fully formed from her father's head, the memories were there, just as the Fates promised. Patroclus was startled by what he saw through Bucky's eyes, at Achilles being so thin and frail. But it was a surprise that passed quickly. Achilles’ tenacity was still there, and with time, Bucky would learn that the artist was still there too, the lyre traded for the pencil. This Achilles was mortal, but no less a fighter, it would be all Bucky could do to keep him from the fray. But Bucky was bigger too, bigger than Patroclus had been, and his limbs filled out before Steve’s. He could wade in and pull Steve out, and did so more times than he could count. They were inseparable from that point on, and he never asked if Steve remembered too, if he had struck the same bargain.

But Bucky would learn he was not the only one who remembered Achilles.

* * *

He saw her sitting on the cot, and cold moonlight streamed through the window, illuminating her black hair like the ocean at night, and her eyes were like the glistening rocks that crush and break the ships of men. She turned at the sound of his approach, and her lips were the color of blood in the water as she frowned her displeasure. 

“ _You_ again,” Thetis said. Thetis, the mother of Achilles but not of Steve. The sea nymph. The goddess. Her voice was the sucking downward spiral of the maelstrom. It crashed in his ears, in his mind, but he was no longer afraid as he had once been. He had died and lived again, while her kind had faded from the earth, leaving nothing but shadow, memory, and cold effigies. 

“You again,” he said back. He felt like Echo in her cave, and at the sight of Thetis he wondered if that was all he was: an echo repeated from the dark. 

Her expression of disdain deepened with her frown, like lines drawn in the sand, and she turned back to Steve. His coughing had eased but he was pale in the cold light, his lips parted in sleep. Bucky could see his ribs, even through the thin shirt Steve wore to bed.

“Why?” Thetis said. “Why may you see him, _know_ him, when I may not?” 

“Haven’t you already done enough?” he said, and did not bother to keep the anger from his voice. 

“I am his mother,” she retorted. 

“Not in this lifetime.”

As he looked at her, he remembered Mrs. Rogers, the woman at the root of all Steve was in this lifetime. The nurse who had patched up soldiers, who had risked tuberculosis to bring care to the dying, who had stayed up with Steve all night while he seemed to cough his own life away. Widowed, but never helpless, she had taught Steve that being frail did not have to mean being weak. Her eyes had been kind and blue like Steve’s.

“I would rather he stayed dead than come back like this,” she spat, and it was the vengeful crash of a wave. 

“And that is why you have never deserved him,” Bucky said, and there is more Patroclus in it than Barnes. He was fiercely glad in that moment that there was nothing of Thetis in Steve’s face. “He is better like this.”

“Better?” Her voice was chill. “He is mortal, through and through. It lies upon him like a veil.”

“Good,” Bucky said. “Let him have this, let him have a _life_. Hasn’t he earned that much?”

She smiled then, and it opened her face like a knife wound, the inside of her mouth bloody and red as a gutted fish. “Too late for that, mortal. Can you not see the sign of glory stamped upon his brow? He will know renown or he will know death before the year is over. The greatest battle of this world calls for him, and with its thousand voices it calls for _Achilles_. Even you must hear its cry.”

The war in Europe. The noise of it rose like a tide around them, the rattle of bullets, the roar of mortars and the screams of men. The shadows of barbed wire twined their way across the wall and he saw the new chariots of this era, the rumbling tanks, airplanes like angels of death. In the center sat Thetis, hunched over Steve like a bloodthirsty specter, a banshee on the gable that waits to give its death cry. 

“They won’t take him,” Bucky snapped. They won’t, they can’t, and no amount of a god’s stubborn pride will change that. Steve was too frail, his body already broken, thought his heart wasn’t, and that heart was worth so much more than to be another faceless soldier in another man’s army. He shouldn't have to make his renown in this life by killing. 

But Thetis was right, Bucky could see greatness in Steve, shining like a star. It haloed him, it plucked him out from the crowd even when he was small. It was how Bucky first saw him, struggling to his feet, wiping blood from his mouth with the back of his hand, blue eyes blazing as he readied his fists. 

“They won’t take him,” he repeated, but it was as much to reassure himself. He faltered. Thetis’ bloody smile was still there and her black star eyes glittered. 

“Hubris, mortal,” she said mockingly, “to presume to know the ways of the gods.”

“The gods are dead,” he said.

“And so will this one be, if he does not take up his glory.”

“I won’t let him,” he said. 

“Then you will die as well,” she said. “They will take you too, and you will only follow him into death if he does not do this.”

“You don’t know that.”

She did not answer that, but for a moment she seemed to solidify, become more real than all the world around them, as if she were the axis on which the universe turned. He shrank back. No answer was needed, she might as well have spoken aloud. The gods still lived, and even if the sacrifices were gone and their memory faded they still had this: the gift of prophecy.

“Yes, prophecy,” she said, as if plucking his thoughts from the air. “Let me offer you another, mortal. Do not take up the shield of Achilles as you once did. It was never yours to bear. Ignore my words, and all that you are now will be destroyed.”

She rose then, the hem of her black gown pooling around her like the tattered shreds of night. He could see the first rosy fingers of dawn lightening the sky behind her, saw the light warm Steve’s hair from white to gold, as if the sun returned life to him. 

She was gone between one breath and the next, and Bucky awoke to the smell of salt water and Steve’s body curled against him. The wool of the blanket scratched at his cheek, but the dream did not flee. The dreams of Patroclus never did. 

* * *

Erskine would tell Steve on the night before the operation, well into the schnapps bottle that Steve could not share, why Schmidt would never recreate the serum. 

“…Not if he tried for a thousand years. He only succeeded once because he stole from me, but he did not understand what he did, yes?” Erskine said, and there was a hint of sly humor in his eyes. 

“Why not?” Steve said. His voice was sharp and clear in his own ears, cutting through the veil of unreality that seemed to surrounded every moment since he heard of the serum. His body thrummed with anticipation, as if it knew what was coming, as if it waited for the morning when mortal clay would be turned to gold. Erskine was a stone at the center of it all, solid and dependable, worn by the harsh winds of war and time, and Steve felt an odd rush of affection for the man. He imagined it was the way armor must love the blacksmith that forged it, and wondered if he hadn’t accidentally drank from the schnapps bottle, because the world was hazy around him except for Erskine, and his thoughts felt strange and not his own. 

“There is,” Erskine hiccuped, “a secret ingredient. Impossible to replicate, it will not show up in any scientific test. I know, I have tried. Even if I told you what it was right now you would not believe me. I am like Cassandra,” he laughed at this, half to himself as he took another sip. 

“Try me,” Steve said, leaning in. His knobby elbows dug into knobbier knees as he did so. He was close enough to see the individual white hairs mixed with the gray of Erskine’s beard, to smell the alcohol on his breath. Steve had never seen the man so relaxed before, as if after many years Erskine had come to the end of a long road. 

Erskine’s chuckling subsided, and he gave Steve an owlish look over the rim of his glasses. “Water from the River Styx.”

“There's no such thing,” Steve said, and was surprised at his own knee-jerk reaction. 

Erskine gave a crowing laugh and settled back in his chair, swirling the schnapps in his glass. “There, you see? Even you cannot believe it. It is as they intended.”

“They?” Steve said. He was curious, humoring the man. He realized now that Erskine was far into his cups, but the awareness was strange, changing. He had never before disbelieved Erskine as he did now, and the doubt felt like a creature that lived outside of himself, that imposed its will upon him. Steve fought through it, craning his ears and eyes, both damaged and faulty, part deaf and part blind, searching for some sign of falsehood.

“The gods,” Erskine said, and the words sucked the air from the room, the breath from their bodies. The burning filament of the light bulb flickered like a candle and the room darkened around them until it was like a cave, and they were two early men wearing skins and furs, hunched over a dying fire and speaking of superstition as their shadows danced in ways that did not match their movements. “Schmidt understood that much, but he did not understand what it _meant_.” 

His eyes went distant behind his glasses, and Steve’s reflection was a single spot of white in the darkness of Erskine’s eyes as he mused. “There is a cave in Greece carved from the rock: the source of the River of Acheron. I should not have to tell you that that at least is real. You will believe me if I tell you that. Here, I could even show you on a map. It is in the northwest, and the river flows from a cave there, seething like a cauldron. The ground to either side is red with clay and blood. You must make a sacrifice before you enter, to provide payment.”

A chill settled upon Steve’s shoulders at Erskine's words, and the night itself seemed to press in around them. “What did you do?” he breathed. 

“Nothing like you are thinking, nothing your own neighborhood butcher doesn’t do every day. I paid for a sheep from the local village, prepared the altar and when all was ready, made the sacrifice. The sheep was meant for slaughter that day in any case. The bones and fat we offered to the gods, and that afternoon we made gyros from the meat,” Erskine grinned at that, as if at a pleasant memory, but then it slipped into a frown and he shook his head. “That is what Schmidt will never understand. They, HYDRA, call themselves mystics but they only believe in their own power. They trust that they understand the will of the gods. Schmidt followed me after, and there he did the unforgivable: he thought that a single animal would not be enough to appease the gods and enter the Underworld, that nothing less than a hecatomb would suffice. That is the greatest of sacrifices: one-hundred animals. Only the richest kings could afford it in the ancient world, and Schmidt always did believe himself a king. And he may have been right, had he stopped there.” 

Something stirred at the corner of Steve’s vision, and though they were alone he thought he saw a figure wavering like a mirage in the shadows of the corner. Erskine’s words seemed to echo in that room as well, as if they were not fully his own, as if the past could be played before Steve’s eyes like a film instead of merely told.

“Schmidt made his sacrifice, oh yes, but he thought to do better than a king. Instead of animals, he sacrificed one hundred men, women, and children from the nearby village. He slit their throats and stacked their bodies like cordwood, burning them whole upon the altar. Tantalus himself could not have dreamt of such horrors, the black smoke spread for miles, the ground itself cried out at its putrefaction. You see, to the gods, human sacrifice has always been the greatest abomination."

“He entered the Underworld, paid the ferryman, and they took him in. He could not have escaped their notice, for the gods are always eager to give mortals what they wish for, so they may twist it to their own doom. He returned with a vial of water from the Styx, black as ink. No light passed through it, even when held to the sun. It is the water that separates this world from the next, life from death, and not even light may pass through those waters without the boatman’s permission.”

“But I’ve seen the formula,” Steve interrupted. “You showed it to me, it’s not black it’s… blue, cerulean.” The color wheels of his art classes came back to Steve, had never really left, and he could think of no way that water as dark as what Erskine described would not be visible mixed in with the formula, unless diluted to nothing. 

“Yes, that should have been Schmidt’s first warning. He had permission, but not their blessing. He had sent too many across the waters of that realm, and they blocked his way. They called for vengeance, and all the dead thirst for blood. That is why the water he took was black.” Erskine drained the last of his glass as if he too numbered among the dead, the liquid staining thirsty lips like blood. His eyes were lost in remembrance.

The figure in the corner was wavering, and Steve thought he could see the suggestion of long hair, a woman’s form, tall and proud, a ghost with black eyes. He wondered if it was possible to get drunk on the alcohol fumes coming from Erskine’s breath. He felt drunk, or maybe it was just the lack of food and water, or sleep. It was getting late into the night, and yet it seemed the hands of the clock had not moved at all. The figure in the corner was watching him. 

“Terrible things happened to Schmidt,” Erskine continued, his voice low. “But it was only the beginning of his punishment in this world. Rest assured, a more terrible fate awaits him on the other side of the river. You,” he pressed his index finger against Steve’s chest, over his heart, “will be different. Achilles was made invulnerable by the waters of the River Styx. You will be the new Achilles, but better, because you have known what it is like to be weak.”

The light bulbs guttered suddenly and both jerked upright. For a split second, Steve thought he saw the shadowed figure clearly within the flashing lights. A woman, fully six feet tall, skin like white stone, her hair a torrent of black. Her eyes were sharp and glinting, her teeth flashed in a grimace. He had only a glimpse of her before she turned, and was gone. 

“Power surge,” Erskine said, but even he did not sound convinced.

* * *

_Do not take up the shield of Achilles._

Bucky had awakened to Steve standing above him, sturdy and strong and grinning, and a part of him had screamed at the sight. 

Steve looked like Thetis now, the blood of the gods running through him again. It added a foot of height, of breadth and muscle. Like Achilles’ son, Pyrrhus, Steve had tasted the ambrosia of immortals and there was something in him that was greater than before. Gone was the scrappy fighter who would drag a punk out into an alley for pestering a dame. This new creature was molded from gold, bulletproof and divine. 

 _You took him from me!_ Bucky screamed, even as Patroclus wept with joy at the return of his lover, at the greatest of warriors, who looked down on him glowing with the full flush of his vitality.  

Steve should have been at home. He should have been drawing, picking up dames, collecting scrap in his little red wagon, _anything_ , anywhere but here. The greatest of wars had called to him and now it was all spiraling out of control. This was supposed to be the war Patroclus would fight so that Achilles did not need to, it was all that had gotten Bucky through, the only thought that helped him survive the pain of Zola’s experiments.

Zola had done something to him. Something that tasted of sulfur and bile, liquid poured down Bucky’s throat and injected into his veins. Waters of the River Acheron, because Schmidt had not been allowed back to the Styx. It carried in it the barrier between life and death, but it was not the pure protection that the Styx granted. Bucky could feel it changing him, twisting him, making him hard as stone, strong and precise. Stealing his humanity. Whatever they had done to Steve made him more alive. Bucky felt like he was dying by inches.

_What happened to you?_

_I joined the army._

_Did it hurt?_

_A little._

_Is it permanent?_

_So far._

He did not know who spoke. They were mirrors now, though Steve ( _Achilles_ ) did not know it. Had no reason to suspect, this was a new life after all, and Bucky ( _Patroclus_ ) had never dared ask if Steve remembered as he did. Both had joined the army, been injected, known pain, known they would never be the same. 

Bucky hid the changes, and hid them well. 

No one questioned how he had become a crack marksman overnight. No one remembered that James Buchanan Barnes had been promoted because there was no one else, and because he could keep his head under fire. That he, a kid from Brooklyn, was scrappy for having starved as many winters as he’d eaten, had scuffled in back alleys, and had never fired a gun in his life. This sniper's skill was as new as it was supernatural. 

Bucky tried not to think about it, but simply allowed the world to narrow to a single point, to the inhale, the exhale, to the way the target dropped. He felt something new growing within him, something cold as winter, something Patroclus had never known. He had been no archer, no marksman, the bow had been a coward’s weapon in his home kingdom, and if he had a talent it was never exploited. 

There was more than that, though, more that tore his life apart. He almost didn’t recognize her at first. She had been young back then, had died young and filled with so much promise, a priestess of Artemis before she was fourteen. She was to be married by her father, the High King, to the greatest of Greeks, to Achilles. Instead, she had been killed at the altar. Patroclus still remembered the terror in her eyes when the knife came slashing down. 

Iphigenia, Peggy, was no longer a little girl. This new life and world had given her more, and she had taken it. She fled her father’s court, her home in Britain, when still a teenager. She had begun her career as a contact, a safe-house keeper and had worked her way up to full agent before she was eighteen on sheer guts and persistence. She was unrecognizable from the soft princess Patroclus had known, hardly more than a child; except that she had the same dark curls. 

It seemed the gods had more wishes to fulfill in this new life than his alone. Perhaps Iphigenia asked for a life with Achilles, perhaps she only asked for a life. In any case, their eyes meet, warm brown and blue, and Bucky was only a shadow. Already he could feel himself fading.

Steve's eyes were distant when they returned to their tent, but they became startled when Bucky pushed him down, kissed him roughly, demanded his attention. He got it, and they make love that night, and it is all things at once for Bucky. He kneaded, and bit and rutted. He moaned and everything was hard and bruising and vital, fingers digging into muscle, hips jerking, fucking deep. He did it to remember that he existed, that for now he has flesh and blood. Steve was taken aback by the ferocity, but the new body could handle it the way the old Steve, his Steve, could not.

Before, Steve had always been on top, and there had been sweetness to his dominance, the rapture on his face, and Bucky reveling in the joy of being claimed. This new Steve has already claimed all that Bucky was, just as Achilles had owned all that Patroclus was and they were melting together now that Steve was a warrior once again, not only a scrapper like Bucky in the back alleys of Brooklyn. 

He did not wear his anger, this new Achilles. Steve’s rage was buried deep, under a river of calm, beneath the lessons of his mortal mother. Once again Bucky was glad that Thetis could not touch him in this life, that she was no more than a shadow upon the wall, unable to whisper her poison words of glory and prophecy, urging Achilles to his birthright. He could be so much more than that, always could have. Achilles might have been a healer like Asclepius, or a musician like Orpheus, and instead she had made him a killer like no other. 

Steve does not desire such things, only wished to defeat bullies, those who were strong and feckless as he had once been as Achilles, when he carved his path across the fields of Troy. If Bucky didn’t know better, he’d say it was a penance of its own sort. That before Achilles could become something more, he must first defeat what he had been.

Bucky’s fingers dug into the muscles of Steve’s thigh, ripping a wanton cry from him even as Steve backed himself harder onto Bucky’s cock. Bucky realized his teeth were bared and his eyes stung and he wants to keep this moment as much as he wants to exorcize it. To lance the boil of this pain and let it bleed out, forgotten. To clutch Steve close against him, knowing he would lose him soon. He did not know how he knew, perhaps some gift of prophecy that was as unwanted as it was painful. He would not survive this year, as Thetis has told him, even though he knew Steve would. Must. He had taken up the call of war, and surely that was what the prophecy called for? A life for a life. 

His orgasm speared him, wracked his muscles, and brought him low. Bucky collapsed, forehead pressed to the sweat of Steve’s back, tasting it there like the salt of the ocean, the taste of a sea nymph’s son. Steve was panting beneath him, and Bucky had just enough presence of mind to wrap his hand around Steve’ cock, slick with sweat and desire, and stroke him with long, languorous motions that left Steve whimpering. Steve shuddered beneath him, making noises at the back of his throat that were almost enough to make Bucky hard again. Muscles contracted around Bucky’s softening member, and Steve spent himself on the cot with a muffled cry, teeth clenched. The instant he was finished, he went boneless, and Bucky slipped free. For a moment, he could only stare. The moonlight bathed Steve in white as if he were her beloved, as if he were Endymion asleep in the glade. 

He was beautiful, and Bucky's mouth went dry at the sight, his heart clenching painfully at all that was before him and all he must give up. This was not the old world, and Steve was not the _Aristos Achaion_ , the greatest of Greeks, able to make his own law. If he loved Iphigenia, Peggy, he should go to her, and leave Bucky to whatever he was becoming. 

“What are you thinking?” Steve said, turning onto his back and looking up at Bucky with half-lidded eyes. Sleep was coming swiftly, already Steve’s eyes were shining and satiated, and there was a bloom on his face as he looked up at Bucky. That glow was enough to make Bucky forget for a moment the straps, the table, and the pain of becoming something new, to forget that he must soon give this all up or have it taken from him. His gaze flickered to the corner, expecting to see Thetis, dark eyes like obsidian, edged and disapproving, prepared for vengeance upon the mortal that distracted her son from his destiny. He found nothing there, but Steve followed his eyes curiously, his neck craning, and he turned back too upon seeing nothing. 

“Nothin’ but how much I hate not being able to take you again right now,” Bucky said with a grin he didn’t feel. He should have known better than to try to trick Steve, because he caught the lie immediately. Steve propped himself up on his forearms, the drowsiness banished from his eyes. His brow crinkled with concern. They were still sweat-soaked and dripping, and Bucky’s skin crawled with the need to wash , but he was as helpless to Steve now as he had been when they were Achilles and Patroclus. 

“This isn’t about Peggy, is it?” Steve said, and Bucky’s mouth twisted in bitterness. Once men had thought Achilles simple for his directness. Bucky could see it now, in how others took Steve’s simple goodness, his direct honesty, as a sign of stupidity. It was they that were the fools, they didn't understand the power of a direct thrust to the heart. Steve did not mince words, and didn’t need to. 

Bucky’s silence was acknowledgement enough.

“Aaw, Buck,” Steve sighed. “Look, she’s a swell dame, and you’re right, I’m a little in love with her but it’s…she’s not you. I’m not gonna throw you off for her. It’s just dancing.”

“She doesn’t think that,” Bucky said, because it was true.

Steve looked stricken. “She… I mean, she’s gotta, right? It ain’t nothin’ but dancing, we took plenty of girls dancing.”

“Dancing means something different in the war, Steve,” Bucky said. He could feel his own exhaustion washing through him, as much from the orgasm as from the topic. He fell on his back next to Steve, still not facing him. “Any of us could die at any time out here. I could die tomorrow, and it might not be for some grand, noble last stand. It might just be a lucky sniper, friendly fire, Hell, it could be a goddamn landmine. Someone says they want to go dancing with you, it can mean the rest of their life. You hear the numbers from back home? Every soldier who gets discharged gets snapped up in the first month, they're starving for men back there. If you’d stayed there you’d probably already be married with two kids by now.”

“What if that’s not what I wanted?” Steve said, and his voice sounded as if it came from far away. 

“Of course it’s what you wanted,” Bucky said. “Good little Catholic boy like you? The girls just didn’t know what they were missing. You go back the way you are now, you’ll have to beat ‘em off with a stick.”

Steve laughed under his breath, and Bucky felt the twist of bitterness deep in his gut. Was he thinking about it now? Going home and getting the picket fence and a cute dame? Or worse, settling down with Peggy in some flat in London, being regular ol’ war heroes together? Bucky didn’t know why he couldn’t picture himself at the end of that line, except that he was probably back in Brooklyn somewhere, taking another faceless girl out and wondering what he could have had if he wasn’t a coward.

“Not sure I’ll have to, Buck. There’s only one person I want,” Steve said, and leaned in for a kiss that stole the breath from Bucky’s lungs and he was kissing back, desperately, pushing with his lips and tongue for some sign of a lie. But Steve didn’t lie, and neither had Achilles but for different reasons. He can’t taste any falsehood now, not an ounce of hesitation with how Steve pushed against him, already hardening again, refractory time courtesy of the serum. 

Bucky willed his own erection down. It was too soon, and he didn't want to admit even to himself that he could almost keep up with Steve. He was afraid of what the changes meant. He was learning only now to be careful with what he had wished for a thousand of years before he were born.

“Don’t say nothin’ you’ll regret,” Bucky warned. “You’re not Steve Rogers from Brooklyn anymore, and we ain’t just friends who can get each other off without it meaning anything. You’re Captain America now, _Aristos Achaion_ , you belong to _…_ ”Bucky broke off. He had never used the words from their old life like this before. He saw a flash of the war, of the raised hands of the Greek host, the moment he had known Achilles no longer belonged only to him. Saw it overlaid with the moment they returned to the camp, _Let’s hear it for Captain America!_  

It was all happening again.

He pushed the memory aside. Wondered if Steve had noticed. “Point is, you belong to _everyone_ now. The whole goddamn nation. They’re not gonna take kindly to Captain America being queer.”

“The war's gonna end, Buck,” Steve said, so gently Bucky could barely stand it. “And when it does they won’t care about me anymore. We’ll have our pensions, and we’ve got friends. We can go anywhere we want, anywhere we need to.”

“They’re not going to let you go just like that,” Buck said, and thought he would choke. “They’ll remember you for a thousand years. You stand for something now, Steve, you _matter_.”

“I don’t need glory, I just need you,” Steve said, and it’s all Bucky can do to keep from giving in to Patroclus, to start crying like a little kid right then and there at words he had never thought to hear. “They’ll find someone else, someone who likes being a dancing monkey. There’ll be plenty of those once the fighting is over.”

“You say that now…”

“And I’ll say it tomorrow too,” Steve said firmly. “I’d rather spend one day with you, working as a grocery bagger in some backwater in France, than spend the rest of my life as the best fighter in the army, and that’s the God’s honest truth, Buck. I learned my lesson on that one.”

“When?” Bucky said.

“I—” Steve cut off, looked down, the first time he’d looked sheepish the whole night. “Just…something I figured out while I was out here.”

 _He knows_. _He remembers_ , Bucky thought, but could not bring himself to ask.


	2. Lethe

_Achilles,_  
_you have no cause to grieve because you’re dead.’_  
_“I paused, and he immediately replied:_  
_‘Don’t try to comfort me about my death,_  
_glorious Odysseus. I’d rather live_  
_working as a wage-labourer for hire_  
_by some other man, one who had no land_  
_and not much in the way of livelihood,_  
_than lord it over all the wasted dead._

Homer – The Odyssey, Book 11

 

* * *

He fell.

In that final moment, as he looked up at the retreating train and the last glimpse of sunlight he knew in this world, he remembered picking up the shield. Not in a moment of clarity, it was not a decision as Patroclus had made, begging and wheedling Achilles for permission to take his armor to the battlefield.

(He had only picked up the first barrier he could against the energy blasts, trying not to look at where Steve had fallen hard against the wall. Dispatch the threat, save Steve, fight—

Then the cold, rushing emptiness beneath him and the wind stealing the tears from his eyes. Reaching, grasping for Steve's hand. Failing.)

He remembered her parting words inanely through the rush of wind. _Do not take up the shield of Achilles._

Prophecy cannot be so easily avoided. Those who try play right into its hands.

_FallingrushingfreezingCOLD_

At such a height, even a fall into water is hard as stone. Sudden, jarring and painful as being caught between hammer and anvil, as Hector’s spear going under his ribs and finding his heart, as he was crushed between gravity and the ground. Blackness, or so he assumed, because when he awoke he’d washed up against the jagged stones that lined the river. The water was so cold it pierced like needles, and he knew he was dying. His blood swirled and twisted in clouds from where half his body was still submerged in the water. His left arm was gone, severed below the shoulder. The thought was vague in his head, insubstantial as the cloud of his breath, as quickly caught by the wind and stolen away.

He was not alone.

(He was so cold he was almost warm, crushed and bleeding miles below the train, from where anyone would find him and _he was not alone_.)

She sat at the edge of a shard of granite that rose from the snowdrifts that lined the waters of the river. Her hair trailed behind her and down into river, and her skin was the faint blue of arctic ice. Yet her eyes and hair were black still, black as the waters that stole his life and she watched him, pitiless. If there was any gentler emotion in her eyes it could only be called curiosity, but when he saw the flash of her piranha teeth in the fish-gut red of her mouth he knew it was bitter triumph.

“You were warned, mortal. That is more than most can say.”

When Patroclus had been a ghost haunting his own cairn, a whispering fading voice that shrieked on the wind and begged for a name carved into stone to set him free to the afterlife, they had spoken, he and Thetis, at length. He had told her the song of Achilles as he lived it, paeans to the golden boy they both worshipped. But she had watched and hated him then, just as she watched and hated him now. He could not speak, not even the faint and whispered voice of the dead twisted in the wind. His lips were frozen, he could hardly breathe at all.

“Yet you took up his shield despite my warning. Hubris.”

He wanted to protest, to defend the moment of chaos and the heat of battle where a shield was not a piece of his doom but only a barrier to the more immediate threat. But he could not ignore it, the moment where the shield had felt _right_ in his hand. He would die for that.

“Death? You will not have so simple an escape, mortal.”

This roused him. Bucky stirred, the blood flowing in a renewed burst as he shifted to look at her. Sea nymph they called her, but in this moment she looked more like a banshee, a pale horror sounding the end with her voice, perched upon her gable. Perhaps nymphs took on the elements of the water around them. She had been gray in Brooklyn as the water of the Hudson, dark green veins lurking beneath her skin. Here she was dark, and pale, and frozen blue, melding into the landscape, the rocks slick with ice. He stared at her, the words forming in his mind that he could not speak, could barely form words as his own fading consciousness could not summon the strength to breathe.

 _But you said_ …

Words in his head that flashed like letters on the page, twisting in the confusion of his dying brain, like paper fluttering in the wind.

“That should you take up the shield, all that you are will be destroyed. I never said you would die.”

 _How_ …?

She did not answer but looked up, like an animal tracking a scent, her long arching neck as sinuous and stretched as a sea serpent rising from the depths. When she spoke again her voice echoed in his brain with the crash of a breaking dam.

“They are coming for you.”

He heard it. The tramp of boots in snow and for a moment his heart leapt. They had come for him, just as Steve had found him deep behind enemy lines, when all others had given him up for dead. Steve had not given up, would never give up. A man as tenacious and fierce as the sun would not be stopped by winter.

There was the crunch of boots breaking ice and Thetis looked at him just as the men’s figures came into view. She waited just long enough for him to see: the black of their uniforms, the masks they wore. Skulls ringed with tentacles. She waited just long enough for the first frantic whimper to break his lips, the only scream he could form, as Bucky twitched, failed to move, wished to slip beneath the water, to die.

Thetis dove beneath the waves, the arching of a snake, black robes trailing in an arc behind her, gone without a ripple. They seized him and he fought, the whimper turning finally to a scream.

It was not the last time he saw her, but it was many years again before he would know her name.

* * *

“Sergeant Barnes,” Zola crooned above him. In his hand was a vial of water and Bucky’s eyes flickered to it, breaking into a fresh, cold sweat. “You will be the new fist of HYDRA.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Bucky croaked. “If you think I’m gonna work with you bastards—”

“James,” Zola tutted. “Of course I do not expect you to serve us. Not as you are.” He held up the vial in front of Bucky’s eyes and swirled it. The water was utterly pure save for a sheen; glowing like liquid glass. “Do you recognize this? No, of course you would not. No one alive would remember it.”

Bucky did remember though. Voices like dry leaves in the air, a river before him and the golden shadow of Achilles behind him. Pressing his lips to the water that ran like glass and feeling the cold, like ice, colder than the river they had dragged him from, his bloody stump leaving a trail along the ground. His final words to the Fates. _I want to remember him_ , he had said. _Then drink only a little, or it will drive you mad._

Bucky seized on the operating table, kicked and tore at the bonds, screaming and writhing but they held and he was too weak. He would not die, it would be worse, and he was too weak to save himself and Steve was gone, a thousand miles away and he would not remember because—

“These are the waters of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness,” Zola said. “They will make you stronger, Sergeant Barnes, and they will make you forget. It is amazing, don’t you think, what a man will do when he knows no other life?”

_There will be a price._

_Keep your word, and I will bear it._

_We always keep our word, even when it seems we do not._

“No, no no no. You swore, you swore!”

A strong man, but a bound man, it was a long time before the sedative kicked in and the screaming stop. From there the injection was easy, the dose of clear river water straight into the vein, the dose the water nymph had helped them find. Zola spared only a moment to wonder what the former James Barnes meant with his screaming, but even that was forgotten when a new weapon opened empty eyes.

* * *

There was a woman in the room with him.

The Winter Soldier did not wonder who she was. He had no basis for curiosity.

It was 1945, but the date meant nothing to him. He was strapped down to a chair as his arm underwent recalibration. For the next hour he must sit perfectly still while the mechanism realigned itself with his nerves, his muscles, and cells. To move, to even twitch, would invite agony so intense that he could do nothing but howl. The arm was an alien machine embedded in his flesh, they were not yet one.

He was to be sent on a mission once calibration was complete, he knew, but that was not what the technicians spoke of while the sparks of their tools flew, as they grafted metal to flesh. They spoke of confusion, a lost cube, and a missing leader. Defeat and triumph mingled, they had hidden friends in a place called Washington, and they would survive.

A plane had gone down in the Arctic.

“It was my punishment. They promised me he would not die,” the woman said. He did not move, or speak, but his eyes flickered. She should not be here. No one was allowed in during recalibration, the doctors knew better after he had killed the first one. Yet she spoke as if she knew him: for no one could direct such bitterness towards a stranger. “Why are you here and he is not? Why are _you_ awake when he does not breathe, or speak, or know me?”

Everything about her was water, and that made something stir within him. Not memory, but perhaps instinct. Her hair was black and trailed dripping on the floor. She crouched over the arm of the calibration chair, and for all that she was water, her eyes burned.

“I can hear you, in there. Part of you remembers, alive but buried. He screams like a drowning man. Yet I cannot raise what is left of you hence. There are some waters more powerful than I. Lethe, the Fates, the Underworld, they are greater,” she said, each word rolling like a tide, and like a tide’s voice it held no meaning for him. The stir of recognition became a tingle at the back of his neck.

“Are you my mission?” His tongue felt thick in his mouth but he managed the words without jarring the sensors. He did not dare move further.

“No, little soldier, little tool. I am not.”

“Shame,” he said, and his lips flicker in the muscular memory of a smile. “I think I would have enjoyed killing you.” He paused; unable to place where those words had come from. Somewhere deep within, on the other side of the river within his mind that parted him from all he had once been. All he must have been, because men were not born fully formed into the world. “How is that? Who are you? Who am I?”

The other shore in his mind beckoned, offering an answer to the blankness within. Perhaps this woman, clothed in black like a shroud, its tatters hanging from bare white shoulders and her long black hair shimmering wet down her back, trailing through the doorway… perhaps she could answer questions he no longer remembered how to ask.

“You are No One,” the woman answered. “Lost and far from home. The war is over, yet for all your wanderings you cannot return there. Monsters you will fight, and monsters you will serve, before you find it again. This I foretell. This is all I may offer.”

The door opened, the men in the lab coats returned and when his eyes flickered back she was gone. The next wipe would remove the memory of this meeting, but it was many months before his heart would forget the loss, that brief flicker of rage like a candle in the darkness.

* * *

_Acheron. Styx. Cocytus. Phlegethon. Lethe._

The gods may swear their oaths by the Styx, and bathe their heroes in its waters, but even they know who are beyond her reach know that Lethe is the most powerful. Lethe, who offers solace to the lost, through whom life and death may be breached. Those clear waters are the most sought, the most soothing, and the most to be feared.

A rumor spread to the very borders of the otherworld. A dead man hunting, a hero lost, a beloved beyond reach. Lethe in his veins, and at his hands many went down to the Underworld to cross the rivers. They whispered that he was immortal now, that Lethe had given him life.

Yet the time of gods was over, and their truths had only the half the power once possessed. Water did indeed make a man immortal. Yet no gods or water nymphs were needed when Mankind crossed into the once immortal realms, science the new magic at their fingertips. The water that made the Winter Soldier immortal was not just of the rivers, but of ice, trapping and preserving him in sleep.

Thetis knew the truth. Water had always been her realm, and she watched Patroclus as he slept, chill fingers caressing cold cheeks as she curled up beside him within his frozen tank, watching. So long as there was water, she was there. A thousands miles away, the son of her soul if no longer of her body was trapped in mirrored deaths within the ice. 

The silence stretched over decades. Water and ice and rivers, and dead men walking with Styx, Acheron, and Lethe in their veins.

She remembered.

And waited.


	3. Phlegethon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Contains minor spoilers for Captain America 3: Civil War.
> 
> A special shout-out goes to CrownsAndConverse for the beta work!

_Weeping, Achilles spoke; his Goddess-mother heard,_  
_Beside her aged father where she sat_  
_In the deep ocean-caves: ascending quick_  
_Through the dark waves, like to a misty cloud,_  
_Beside her son she stood; and as he wept,_  
_She gently touch'd him with her hand, and said,_  
_"Why weeps my son? and whence his cause of grief?  
_ _Speak out, that I may hear, and share thy pain."_

Homer - The Iliad, Book 1

 

* * *

She followed him from the river, trailing drops of the Potomac washing green behind her. The man on the bridge lay on the bank, yet it was the asset that she haunted. Perhaps he was mystery she could not solve, perhaps she could not bear the eyes of the other man, that saw her and did not know her.

She was not with him at all times, but after the museum his wanderings lead him across the ocean, to Europe and she was there on the frigate, and along the roads he would see her in glimpses. In the Alps he followed the route of old train tracks cut into the mountain and the steep slope down to the river below and she was there, perched upon a rock, watching him.

They did not speak. He knew she was not human, and that was enough for now. He wasn’t sure he was human, either.

* * *

“There is a sea nymph following you.”

Steve looked up from the data pad. On it was a map of Europe, locations crossed out, making a trail. With Ultron dispatched and the Avengers undergoing the task of rebuilding, others kept an eye out for new threats. They were finding their place in the world, he was once more free to resume the search. Sam had done his best, but the map was lined with dead ends. What he wasn’t expecting was such a nonsensical statement and it took him a moment to realize his deafness had not returned, that he had indeed heard correctly.

“A sea nymph?” Steve said dryly.

Thor nodded. There was something about his certainty, with no trace of smile on his golden features, that sent a chill down into Steve’s gut.

“She is clothed in black, and her shadows linger in the corner when she believes you are not looking. She is subtle, and very, very old. Older perhaps than I. There is a strong resemblance between you.”

“A sea nymph,” Steve deadpanned. Then, “There’s no such thing.”

Thor frowned. “With your own eyes you have seen wonders this world once thought unimaginable. Your flesh is a miracle of science and magic, in your veins runs the river water that separates the living from the dead. Yet you would question something so common as a sea nymph?”

At the mention of the river water, Steve straightened. A memory flickered at the back of his mind: a shadow upon the wall, the schnapps on Erskine’s breath, and the tale of a sacrifice made to cross into the underworld. Disbelief had sat uneasy in his chest, as if placed there by someone else, someone who did not want him to believe what he was hearing.

Steve’s brow furrowed, and he felt it now, the knee-jerk instinct to scoff at Thor. Yet how strange were sea nymphs in a world of otherworldly creatures and souls that lived in machines? Too much had happened for him to look back, to question the shadow upon the wall in the form of a woman with trailing black hair, or the dreams that haunted him at night of another battlefield, dust rising from sandaled feet, and the gleam of bronze.

“There’s no such thing,” Steve said, jaw tight, and this time he did not meet Thor’s eyes.

* * *

The facility was a burned-out husk, with no trace of the water and ice that had once trapped him. Glass lay scattered across the floor, the metal tube that had been his bed and his home a shattered ruin. There was nothing there.

The cuts on his hand healed, his hair was now tied back at the nape of his neck. Each day the water flowed through his veins, mending all the little signs of life, holding back death. Each ache and pain washed away, with no scars left to show the passage of time. His brain it mended as well, proof enough that the serum was both blessing and curse.

He was human, of that much he was now convinced, or at least he had been. So the fact he could not remember anything of who he was troubled him, sat heavy upon his soul. He could not have sprung fully formed from the earth, he was no soldier sown from dragon’s teeth. The man on the bridge had called him Bucky, and his face in a museum had named him James Buchanan Barnes. But memory was kept from his waking mind as if by a wall of ice, separating him from himself, like looking across a river to a far shore shrouded by fog.

So he wandered, No Man never returning home, retracing the steps of his journey and the sight of locations from his file struck his consciousness like meteors upon some distant moon. They left their impressions, but nothing lived or died there. He knew, distantly, that he had killed, and killed and killed. Amazing what a man would do, when he knew no other life.

Only killing the man on the bridge had felt wrong, had felt like anything at all when the man dropped his shield and said the asset should finish his mission. For him, the asset traveled now, for the promise of a memory, for a dream on the other side of the river, blocked by the waters that ran through his veins.

He wandered, and the sea nymph followed.

* * *

Once caught, Steve could not shake Thor’s warning. He began to look into shadows, noticing when they danced in ways that did not match his movements. That was always the sign before he caught a glimpse of her, her black hair coiling like a river snake, white flesh pale as a drowned man’s face.

After all, how could he, an impossible creature with a myth of his own, deny that the impossible outside himself?

He thought he saw her in his dreams, sometimes, when that fish-gut mouth did not look haunting but simply familiar. Did not all mothers have piranha teeth, and black eyes dark as night, and, like night, without edges so when you stared into them it was like looking into a well of stars that went on and on forever? Did not all men look up and up and up at their mothers and see a goddess, a creature of another world who once had decided if you lived or died? He knew no fear in those dreams, only a rightness of being, just as with all children, what we know from earliest memory is not strange to us, it is only what is.

The trail went cold again. If Bucky was out there, he did not wish to be found, last seen crossing into Eastern Europe where their eyes were not quite so sharp, where a man could cover his trail with untraceable paper money and dive into the squalor at the edge of civilization, where no one was who they said they were, and all knew not to ask too many questions. What was one man among so many, in a place where so many did not wish to be found?

So why then did Steve feel like he was the one who was lost? Every day Peggy remembered less and less, and he could not be selfish when her real family deserved as much time with her as the family that would never be. Those were not his children and grandchildren gathered at her bedside, even though when he closed his eyes, for just a moment he could see what might have been. A son, red-haired like Steve's father, maybe. And then, another vision, a brunette with dark, shining curls like Peggy's and a name, _Iphigenia_ , no more than fourteen and for some reason, an altar that was for their wedding but not. Her father walking her up an aisle that led to another life, an ended life and Steve shuddered at a sense of betrayal he could not understand...

What could have been, what never was, and what he now could no longer claim. Would he have still been young had they been married, without the ice to arrest the aging of his flesh? Would he still be just like this in that other life, eternally, damnably young next to his dying wife, wearing the flesh of a golden god that even today felt as separate from him as a suit of armor?

The end was coming. Soon, Steve knew he would be alone again, as he had been when he was eighteen, all except for Bucky and Bucky was out in the world, at the other end of a line he could no longer see, his anchor trailing into the dark below the waves, the chain snapped. He was helpless, and helplessnes had only ever made him angry, when he was sick, when he was small, when there was nothing he could do but watch Bucky slip through his fingertips, down to an icy river thousands of feet below.

Steve knew the price of anger, just as he knew how it coiled within him, like a snake easily roused, ready to strike if he did not soothe it. If he did not quiet it, and let it sleep. It grew and grew in the face of helplessness, no longer a tool for the heat of battle but a monster that would wrap him in its coil, and swallow him whole. Only now the anger was directionless, the most dangerous of all. There was nothing to rage against except time itself, and death, and the fact that death had not come for him sooner, though he was not ready to die, not yet. If he had died, then Bucky would have had no one waiting for him seventy years later, too late to stop it but maybe not too late to save. If he had died then, Bucky would have been alone. If he had lived… if he had not gone into the ice…

His children standing at Peggy’s bedside, and maybe someone would have asked questions. Maybe someone wouldn’t have dismissed the Winter Soldier as a myth, maybe that someone would have been him, and they would have fought in crumbling towers and flying ships while the gunshots of World War II still rattled in their ears and he would have pulled off the mask sooner, and Bucky would have looked at him with eyes that did not know him sooner, and his heart would have broken sooner but there might have at least been a _chance_ …

Steve started at a cracking sound, a spark of pain in his knuckles and pulled his hand free of the wall, the plaster a spiderweb of cracks around the imprint of his fist. He shook his hand out, though the pain was already gone and tiny scratches on his knuckles already healed.

The rage coiled and hissed in his belly and pounded in his head and he remembered _no, not this time_. He had learned his lesson on rage. But the pounding was like a war-drum in his head, it furled around him like smoke. He needed to get away, from this helplessness and and rage, from Time who sat as an indifferent High King, denying him all that he had wanted or earned, just a little happiness, just someone to call his own.

Then, like a finger trailing down the back of his neck, like a shadow moving strangely at the corner of his eye, he remembered. The sea. A mother’s touch and voice calling from waves that crooned and soothed their son. Easy sometimes to forget, in the depths of the city, that New York was a seaside town in the place where Hudson met Atlantic, the fresh water turned to brine. Not so far in Brooklyn, for those swift of foot.

He found a shore not far from the apartment, where the water ran black, and if there were stars in the sky they could barely be seen against the fire glow of the city turning the clouds to burnt umber. Only the lights of man glittered in the Hudson. Here Steve found a dark place, not a peaceful beach where the Aegean met the Dardanelles, but a dockside where those on the edges of society went to be alone, for business, to hide away, or to drown the bodies. 

Steve took a deep breath, taking in the smells of the city freshened by the water: the dumpster further down the pier, the vents from the subway tunnels, and that unnameable mix of smells that was simply _New York_. He looked out to the river, maybe like he was praying, he wasn’t sure, only unlike anger he still had his stubbornness and that he didn’t rein in so much. He felt like he was waiting for something.

* * *

It was 5 AM in Bucharest, and he was walking beside the river, which meant that _they_ were walking beside the river, the shadow that stalked his side like a beast that had not yet decided whether it would gain more pleasure from its prey by eating it or playing with it. He hated her, which seemed to suit her just fine, and it suited him, this agreement of creatures that were not quite human. He did not know why she stayed by his side when it was the other one she wanted, that they both wanted. But who was he to judge? He stayed away too, probably for the same reason. When you want something so bad, sometimes it’s just easier to stay away.

The shadow that wavered on the water like a shark lurking just below the surface stopped, then from the center of that shadow like a water spout rose a woman’s form, dark and forbidding. She looked to the West, away from the sun. Her body was suspended as if by a thread, poised and alert as a predator smelling blood. Yet there was longing in her eyes.

( _longing_ )

( _rusted_ )

( _seventeen_ )

( _No, please stop._ )

“He is calling for me,” she said, and in her voice was water. Not the goddess’s crashing sea, but the tears of a mother aching for her son. For just an instant there was a flash of something mortal in her eyes.

And just like that, she was gone, sparing not a glance for the shell of a man that she haunted.

* * *

“Do not turn around.”

Steve froze at the woman’s voice, deep and echoing and somehow more real than the distant hum of the city or splash of waves against the concrete shore. A hand brushed his shoulder, and he heard the rustle of silk as she crouched behind him, the press of a woman’s eyelashes against the back of his neck and the dampness of tears, cold as the sea.

“You must not look at me,” her voice wavered, and the fingertips on his shoulder clenched helplessly. Steve remained still, some part of him knowing he should fear the cold kiss of a gun barrel against his back. He feared it less, knowing it would not kill him, and feared himself more.

“Why not?” Steve said. “Who are you?”

“Your mother,” the voice said. “On the shores of the wine-dark sea your father captured and held me, and put you inside me. You are the only joy that mortal life has given me. I took you to the River Styx and dipped you by the heel into the water, my son, my only. You were to have an immortal life, but it was not enough and you died, and only your name was immortal. As you wanted, as you asked. But now you have returned to me… my Achilles.”

“Sarah Rogers is my mother,” Steve and felt her tense, those long fingers tightened on his shoulder, not enough to hurt but there was such a terrifying strength behind them. Like his own, when the ability to crush was easier than remembering to hold back.

“She was only a womb,” the woman spat. “ _I_ am your mother.”

He wanted to pull away, to shout down this phantom creature behind him and somehow put words to the memories rising inside him. Sarah Rogers, _Mama_ , with her golden hair tied back and tired eyes that were nonetheless kind, of those final days when the only thing keeping her from tending to the dying was that she was dying herself, coughing out her life in the other room and he could not go to her because if he did he might die too. So he watched helplessly from afar as his mother faded to nothing, and was gone.

Instead he said, “Let me see you.”

“You are mortal. If you see me as I am, you will die,” the voice said and trembled so that Steve regretted his harshness.

“No,” he said, and remembered something that Erskine had told him that night when the shadows had danced on the wall and he had caught a glimpse a woman, this woman, the sea nymph because even in public schools they teach you the mother of Achilles. He remembered the river water in his veins. “I'm not mortal anymore.”

The words tightened in his throat, the ones he had been afraid to speak because they sounded too much like Schmidt when he stood across a river of fire, taunting Steve. _We have left humanity behind_.

But right now it is the right thing to say, and doesn’t Captain America always do the right thing? Unlike Achilles, who always did what his heart told him, Achilles' heart that was so full of rage, that had loved Patroclus, and fame, and war, and had brought him early to the land of the dead, where he swore that he would not make those mistakes again in his next life. That he would be better, not a perfect soldier, but a good man, and he would this time not lose Patroclus, and he would not fling himself into war, and he would not let pride and rage leave him hollow.

Except it had not gone that way. It had gone the same way, and Steve did not know where these thoughts were coming from but perhaps the sea nymph at his shoulder had brought back these thoughts that hovered in his head like half-remembered dreams. But it had been the right thing to say, because she moved, the cold press of her skin against his faded as she drew back, and knelt before him on the concrete steps at the edge of the river.

“See,” he said, as she looked up at him. Utterly inhuman, black eyes against a pale face laced through with green veins the color of the Hudson, and from those dark eye dripped tears unheeded as she looked up at him and he did not die. “I told you.”

“ _My_ _son_ ,” she whispered, like the hiss of ocean spray. She reached up and pressed cold fingers to his chin, brushing her thumb over his jaw, and wrapped her other arm around his knees.

“Mom,” Steve said, as much a question as a name. It didn’t feel right, but it was close. His mother had died when he was eighteen, in 1936 which was ten years ago and eighty, something no one really seemed to understand when they reminded him that he was old. He had found her headstone rubbed smooth by time. Part of Steve didn’t mind this creature calling herself his mother, even if it was just a little off from center, just a little wrong. That part of him was just happy to have one small thing back after everything lost.

“You are mourning, my son,” she whispered, looking up at him. “Why do you mourn, when your fame is eternal, and your body strong, and all the world lies at your feet for the taking?”

He had to stop himself from recoiling, the illusion of a mother from shattering, and pushed away the image of a twisted thing before him, slimy and glistening creature from the bottom of the sea as memory rose again. _She only cared for your happiness when it matched her happiness_ , a voice at the back of his mind said, as if reminding him.  _She wanted you to be immortal, because that is all she understands. She never understood why you loved…_

“Patroclus,” Steve said.

Her expression locked tight, like powerful jaws slamming shut. “You will not find him. Not when he does not wish to be found.”

“So he’s alive?” Steve pressed. “Please, just tell me he’s alive. Is he safe?”

“Not safe, no,” she said. “Not from you, or his keepers, not even from himself. He is something else now, for he took up your shield, and all that he was has been destroyed. I warned him of this. He did not listen.” And beneath the ocean roar of her voice, a hint of smug satisfaction.

He grabbed her arm, fingers curling around flesh as cold to the touch as an eel. She went still, staring up at him, lips parted to the very tips of pointed teeth showed behind the fish-gut red of her lips. “Take me to him.”

“I cannot,” she said, and he tightened his grip, shook her.

“Then help him,” Steve said, and her eyes narrowed.

“I _will_ not,” snapped the sea nymph.

“ _Mother._ ” And he remembered the sign she had made, kneeling at his feet, one hand to his chin the other wrapped around his knees. The sign of supplication, even the gods could not refuse one who begged with such a gesture, one of utter self-abasement. He didn’t care. He would beg, if he must. He touched his fingertips to the bottom of her chin.  He would go on his knees and swear oaths and serve whatever god he must, it didn't matter. “ _Please_.”

“Do not ask this of me, Achilles,” she said, her eyes flickered down to the hand brushing her chin, to the desperation that must have been clear on his face. “He is not worthy of you, he never was. Let him go. He is only another mortal twisting in the breeze, soon to be snuffed out once they find him, and learn what he has done. He is a pathetic creature, unable to remember even why he is hunted. There is Lethe in his veins. He is lost.”

“Lethe,” Steve said, seizing upon the word that took him away from the sick feeling twisting in his stomach, at Bucky hunted, shot like an animal and not even knowing _why_. “I remember that. What is it? What do you mean?”

She hesitated, but then she had never been able to deny her own son. When she spoke next it was halting, reluctant, each word off kilter like a wave disrupted in its rhythmic crash, so that a listener waits, suspended, for the next beat of the tide. “They who worship the river serpent, the many-headed Hydra, they have poured Lethe water into his veins. He is barred from his own thoughts. Like the dead, he will not remember himself until he passes once more into the Underworld, when memories of all past lives return to mortals.”

“ _No_ ,” Steve said, as if words alone could change reality. Maybe they could. He remembered the word waiting on the tip of his tongue, and that for some creatures, names have power. “Thetis, please. Save him. That’s all I’m asking.”

“If I remove Lethe’s water…” Thetis said, with such reluctance and hatred on her face that it twisted her, and made her seem more monstrous and more human all at once. “Then he will know who he is. He will remember you. But nothing can save him from what is to come.”

“I can,” Steve said, and looking into the eyes of the water nymph, he remembered a beach, and weeping for a lost woman he had owned as a slave, and he shuddered at the man he had been. How this woman, his mother, had gifted the man he had been with armor to soothe his wounded pride. But he had learned since then of the danger of pride, how in the end no shield was worth the loss of Patroclus. He would do better this time. “Mother, this is all I will ever ask of you.”

Her inhuman eyes searched his face, the lines of hatred still etched on her features as if they were carved there, never to be washed away by even the strongest tide. “You are a different man. My son knew there was more importance in glory and his immortal name, than for such broken creatures as pass their days in a blink on this failing world.”

“I know,” Steve said evenly, holding his gaze steady. “Just like I know I was wrong. Maybe only creatures that can die can ever learn from their mistakes.”

Her expression hardened, and for a moment he wondered if he should take it back, if he should humor the sea nymph, this impossible being who had once given birth to him, and that wasn’t even by far the most impossible part of his life. Was he being cruel to a creature that found her joy in cruelty? Was a little of the old Achilles shining through?

What would that do to Bucky?

“I will do this for you,” she said, and stood. For the first time he saw the black gown of dripping silk that trailed from her white shoulders, down into the water. She looked back at him, over her shoulder. “But only because he will not thank me for it.”

Steve’s eyes widened. “Wait!” he snapped, starting to his feet on the hard steps, reaching out for her arm. 

She leapt, too swift for mortal eye but not for his, a blur of a woman becoming water, if she had ever been anything else, and Steve’s hands closed around empty air.

* * *

The yellow light of morning crested the narrow window of the basement in which he slept, and illuminated a black figure rising from the ground, where water trickled into the room from a busted pipe in the corner, its steady _drip, drip_ was the only thing counting time in that empty place. He awoke to the sound of her footsteps, the slither and slip of them across the floor and her shadow as it crossed over his face, as she looked down at him with eyes that had never known death and so perhaps had never been alive.

“You,” he croaked, looking up at the creature who had been his constant companion since the waters of the Potomac.  _You_ , she had always echoed back, their ritual, their greeting.

Her hand closed over his mouth.

He seized, the thing that had once been called Bucky closed his hands around hers, clawing at her with his nails and metal fingers, but she did not release him. He choked, feeling _something_ rise inside him like vomit and he was drowning from water so cold it made him long for the warmth of the cryo tube. He shuddered and gagged and struggled in her grip and she looked down, implacable and satisfied and cruel, inhuman face twisted between resentment and satisfaction. Her hand lifted and he choked for air but the water kept coming, a thin stream that shone like molten glass in the light from the grubby window, and his hands flew to his throat, gasping for air, then to his head as the first vision crashed into his mind.

_Sergeant Barnes, you will be the new fist of HYDRA…_

_Friends call me Bucky._

_Let’s hear it for Captain America!_

_Aristos Achaion! Aristos Achaion! Aristos Achaion!_

_Bucky, grab my hand!_

She yanked, and the thin stream snapped free of his mouth. It hovered in a silver ball above her hand, and she looked down at him, black eyes without pity. “Consider this my gift to you, little soldier, your homecoming after so many years. You will find more dangers here than you ever did lost upon the waves.”

But he did not hear her, nor noticed when she turned and vanished back into the shadows that swallowed her like the tatters of night. Vision after vision flashed in his mind. Brooklyn and Steve and the army and falling and freezing and _death after death after death…_ The fog that shrouded his mind cleared as if blown away by a harsh wind and finally, after seventy years, he could see the far shore of his own memory.

Bucky pulled the pillow over his face, teeth clenching in the fabric, and screamed.


	4. Cocytus

_Mother tells me,_  
_the immortal goddess Thetis with her glistening feet,_  
_that two fates bear me on to the day of death._  
_If I hold out here and I lay siege to Troy,_  
_my journey home is gone, but my glory never dies._  
_If I voyage back to the fatherland I love,_  
_my pride, my glory dies..._  
_true, but the life that's left me will be long,_  
_the stroke of death will not come on me quickly._

Homer - The Iliad, Book 9

* * *

 

Thetis was the daughter of the king below the sea, and as one of fifty she had been given to a mortal man to paw after, and rape, and place a child within, and none had spoken out, and none had cared. The gods had celebrated her wedding because it meant their king was safe, for it was foretold she was to give birth to a man greater than his father. As if any man was so great that it would be a difficult task.

The palaces beneath the sea were long gone. The gods and nymphs stalked the world as shadows or had vanished into the ephemera when they were forgotten. They who had never known a mortal touch drifted further apart, dissipating into nothingness, leaving only those chained to the world of dying flesh by mortal touch, and she who had been given to a mortal man and given birth to a mortal child was trapped among them by as surely as chthonic shades, the blood drinkers and sacrifice-takers that made their homes in the dark places of the world. She would not have left anyway, knowing that mortals like their failing world lived and died in cycles. If she was patient, she would see her son again.

She did not know why she expected him to be alone.

And now the lost man that had followed in her son’s shadow curled insensate on the mattress, lying in his own filth, eyes glazed and staring as day turned into night turned into day again. She could leave now, she could return to her son and follow at his side and tell him it was done, and the lost man who had once been Patroclus, and James, and the Asset was his once more, now something of all three.

As ever, her son had asked without knowing what he asked. And she had given without telling, because that was the way of immortals. Men asked and they begged and wheedled and sacrificed and gabbled at the sky for what they wanted, but never bothered to understand the price for those miracles. They never asked. They never said when, for the gods fulfilled their bargains at a time of their own choosing. It may be a hundred years hence, a thousand, before justice would come, and the one who begged long dust. The cruelest of gods would grant wishes only to those mortals wise enough to regret the asking.

Her son had asked for his lover back, and she had given, and though he had not asked the price or set the time. She had done it swiftly as no immortal being ever would, and precisely, though Achilles had not taken the care to make his deal correctly. She had done it for love of him, and now his lover lay in filth lost in his own mind, just as the wish of Achilles truly meant, had he only thought of it.

She could go to him now, and it could be as it once was. Her son, her perfect child who had wept without her, and cried out on the battlefield for her aid and she had brought him shining armor and gifts, simple requests joyfully granted. He was part immortal again, and once more he could lay his head in her lap and she could stroke salt-water fingers through his golden hair. All she had to do was leave this wretch to his misery, ill-fated as he had ever been in life after life as he followed her son like a lost mongrel, and came between them, and distracted Achilles’ eye.

She could leave Patroclus any time she wanted.

Thetis stayed, crouched on the end of a stained mattress in a dank basement, with a man who had been dead longer than he had been alive, while the world of mortals turned above and heedless time marched on.

* * *

Bucky didn’t know, and there had never been any point in telling him, that he and Steve had never been as discreet during the war as they thought they were.

It was not long after the night of the Red Dress. The night Bucky had fucked Steve with wild desperation, with fear that Steve could only now recognize as Bucky’s terror at not knowing what HYDRA had done to his body. Two days later, Colonel Phillips called Steve in to a private meeting.

Philips was sitting at his desk when Steve arrived, in the uniform he used in SI meetings. Official business then, Steve had thought, something about SSR. He saluted, and stood at attention, waiting for Philips to order him at ease. Steve’s first hint that something was wrong was when Philips only regarded him, lined face hard and unreadable.

“You have a talent for putting me in awkward positions, Rogers,” Philips drawled. He stood, and rounded his desk to stand in front of Steve, looking up at him. Steve stayed rigid, but his brow wrinkled.

“Sir?”

“Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. Hell, you had every other disqualifier a man could have without keeling over. Asthma, TB exposure, conjunctivitis, surprised you even made it all the way out to boot camp.

“You wouldn’t be the first, sir.”

“I will be making the smart comments here, soldier, you will shut up and stay shut up until I ask you a question. You tried to enlist eleven times but never made it to the psych exam, did you, Rogers? That’s a question.”

“No, sir. I was usually rejected at the door.”

“And Erskine for all his talk of looking beyond the physical was never much one for convention. I take it he never gave you the institution questionnaire? That’s another question.”

“No, sir.”

“So he didn’t know about you and Barnes?”

Panic flared, but panic did stupid things to him and Steve’s mouth was running before his senses could catch up. The words rose from somewhere deep, and personal, and _old_. “Your screening process would prevent men like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Achilles from fighting in the army, sir.”

“Since two of them were generals and the other is fictional, they are outside my pay grade and purview, Rogers, so I can’t say I’m much concerned about their loss.” Philips gave an exasperated huff, and squinted up at Steve. “We can always get another Captain America for the press, but it would be a shame about the serum. You know they would destroy you for this back home? Once word got out no one would care that you fought for your country. I’ve seen it a hundred times.”

“Is this blackmail, sir?” Steve said stiffly.

“It’s a warning. And a reminder that I’m a lot more generous than you think. Next time, don't get caught. This is your first war, kid, but if you play your cards right— God help you— it won't be your last. ”

 _Not my first war, no,_ Steve thought. _I have been prepared for war since the day I was born and dipped into the Styx, spent ten years storming the beaches and cities of long forgotten shores, commanded the shades of the underworld for a thousand years. I have watched my lover die and my men die and I have avenged Patroclus. I murdered Hector and dragged his body behind my chariot. I have seen myself reflected as a monster in the eyes of an old king who wanted his son's body back so he could mourn him, as I mourned Patroclus, and you dare, you_ dare _say that I know nothing of war, you child, you…_

Steve nodded, jawing clenching as he straightened and gave a perfect salute. “Understood, sir.”

* * *

Today their empty memorial tombs were side by side in Arlington Cemetery. James Buchanan Barnes ever at Steve Roger’s right hand, though both had fallen far away, into water and ice, into years of sleeping and waking to find their world stolen away from them.

Steve had thought there would be a hunt after Bucky left him on the shores of the Potomac. That the Winter Soldier would vanish into the wilderness, to the Arctic like Frankenstein’s monster and Steve would give chase, always a step behind, searching from some inner scrap beneath the programming as it drove Bucky relentlessly onward. That they would dodge all the soldiers and mooks and spies that tried to stop them, who would put a bullet in both their brains as soon as look at them (and would it work? He didn’t know). He had resigned himself to it. Their lives had been given to violence, so only violence could bring them home again.

He had forgotten about Bucky, somehow. Bucky wasn’t complicated like that, he didn’t want to hunt HYDRA to the ends of the Earth. He had only wanted one thing during the war: for it to end.

 _You’re my mission_. Did Bucky even remember the first time he’d said that? When they had waited in their cabin in the Alps the day before the mission, before Zola, and the train running between icy peaks.

The other commandos had been huddled by the fire but Bucky was on the edge, the flames flickering in his eyes. His face was shadowed and distant, and in the darkness he seemed pale despite the embers’ glow.

Steve had scooted closer to him. It was cold enough to justify it regardless of Philips' warning. Not that this body felt it, Bucky too did not shiver as the other men did, and Steve hadn’t asked. They hadn’t talked about where Steve had found him on the operating table of Zola’s lab, track marks from needles running up his arms like stitching. He thought this mission may help, knowing that Zola was behind bars, taken back to America for the justice he so richly deserved, after he gave them the keys to destroy HYDRA once and for all. Then, maybe, he could ask Bucky what had happened and this time Bucky would not push him away, and they’d sit together as they had when they were children, inclining their heads as they whispered secrets. Bucky would finally explain what it was that shadowed his eyes and hollowed him out so that he was like a glass statue of himself, pale and burning as if devoured from within. They would talk about distant memories of sand, and war, and bronze flashing in the sun.

“Are you ready?” Steve murmured, angling himself towards Bucky and away from the others. They did not look up. That Bucky had been there first, last, and always, and when they went off together there was no gossip from the Commandos. Everyone got through the war in their own way.

Bucky looked up, as if dragged from somewhere deep within himself. His eyes were blue like ice, questioning. He raised one eyebrow. They didn’t need words to speak.

“For the mission tomorrow,” Steve said.

Bucky grunted, a noncommittal sound, and looked back to the fire.

“We will get Zola, I promise. Once we do… well, he’s going to go somewhere where he can’t hurt anyone again,” Steve said. There was no reaction, and Steve felt the prickle of worry up his spine. “That’ll be good. Right, Buck?”

“Yeah, not hurting anyone else. S’good,” Bucky said. His face barely moved as he spoke, but he pressed his lips together in that way he did when there was more on the tip of his tongue, but he held back because he thought better of it. To Steve’s eyes he might as well as shouted his disagreement to the heavens.

“I don’t know what he did to you,” Steve said, and Bucky looked away, “and you don’t have to tell me. But I thought… this might help.” The silence stretched, and Steve thought he must have miscalculated. Once he had known every twitch of Bucky’s lips, ever blink, every breath for a language of its own. But Steve had changed, and he was beginning to realize something had changed in Bucky too. They joked about old times, they laughed together, touched one another at night, but Bucky had a rigidity to him now, as if clutching a secret close. “Once this mission is over, once we have Zola…”

“ _Fuck_ Zola,”  Bucky snapped. He spoke under his breath, but his eyes were burning with that terrible cold as he looked as Steve. “The mission ain’t gonna end with him, Steve. It’s _never_ going to end.”

“What...?” Steve began, taken aback first by the profanity, then by the venom in Bucky’s words.

He was too startled to even be relieved, that they were finally getting somewhere. That Bucky had finally voiced a complaint, started to show what was lurking beneath instead of hiding behind silence and a happy face. “That’s not true. The war is going well, once we take down HYDRA—”

Bucky’s glare was so ferocious it stopped Steve short. “I never took you for stupid, or is that star-spangled helmet squeezing your brain?”

“Hey,” Steve warned, “tell me what you mean or don’t, but you know as well as I do this is for the war. I don’t let it go to my head, and you don’t give me crap about it.”

Color rose high in Bucky’s cheeks, his nostrils flaring, but then his shoulders sank and he scrubbed a hand through his hair, still slicked back, but grown longer with all the time spent away from base, strangely familiar. He looked around at the other commandos, leaning in to hiss in Steve’s ear.

“You think they’re going to let you go when the war is over? After everything they went through to get that serum; when they’ve got no way to make another? If you’re lucky they’ll just want you to fight, again and again. They’ll probably _find_ shit for you to do, people for you to kill. If there isn’t a war they’ll make you a damn assassin.”

“I won’t fight like that, and you know it,” Steve snapped.

Bucky snorted. “You think that’s going to matter to them? They’ll hollow your brain out with a spoon if they have to, they’re not gonna just _let_ you go.”

Steve searched Bucky’s face. “Where is this coming from, Buck?”

Bucky hesitated, then a shiver ran through him. “Something Zola said. Not to me, they didn’t care about me. I was just a slab of meat for them to… poke and prod, and stick needles into. They talked in front of me like I was nothing. But they said… they said they had friends on our side. People like them. That there were already plans for what they would do with you once the war was over, and it was all about… control. Making you forget, making you a… a weapon. Like you were meant to be. What if they decide a gun with a mind of its own is too risky?”

“That’s not gonna happen,” Steve said. “I’m not gonna let that happen. When the war is over, we’ll both go home. Back to Brooklyn, and we’ll kick up a fuss if they try to stop us.” He grinned.  “And you know how good I am at kicking up a fuss.”

The corner of Bucky’s lip twitched, even if the shadow did not leave his eyes. “Sure do.”

“About Zola,” Steve said, because he hadn’t forgotten Bucky’s words, the torture, the needles. “I saw the operating table, Buck. The room they kept you in. If you want to talk about it…”

“After the mission,” Bucky said.

Steve sat straighter. It was more than he’d got in weeks, more than he’d gotten at all from Bucky who would shut up and clamp down if he even mentioned the rescue. “Ok. Tomorrow then, after Zola.”

Bucky laughed, and there was true amusement in it. The look he gave Steve out of the corner of his eye was bright, and secret, free of that shadow despite his words. “I’m not here for Zola, Stevie. You’re my mission. Always have been. And it’s over when you’re home safe.”

“When we’re both home safe,” Steve corrected, marveling at how clear his voice sounded despite his tightening throat, “We’re getting you back too. I can even ask them now, if you want to go home…”

“Nah, it’s both or neither,” Bucky said. “And if you’re the only to get out of this, you better make damn sure you go home and live a good life, or I swear I’ll haunt you.”

“That’s not gonna happen, Buck, we’re both gonna make it out. I swear on my mother’s grave,” Steve said, and maybe that was the final straw of their luck.

Because the next day Bucky fell, and Zola didn’t. Instead the scientist made himself a nest nice and cozy inside the US government. Project Paperclip. Project Winter Soldier. Project Rebirth. All tied up and intertwined, the good and the bad, the volunteer and the slave, all ending in ice.

He couldn’t have said it to Peggy as he brought the plane crashing down. She would have disagreed, or corrected him. She would have told him it wasn’t true. Or maybe it would have served as a warning, something she carried with her as she founded SHIELD. But Steve was thinking of Bucky’s words at the end as the ground rushed up to meet him. That they’d never let him go, and so he had to check himself out. Better to go out saving millions of lives, to die a shield, rather then be turned into a weapon. He just hadn’t known that they’d find another soldier, and that he wouldn’t be around to shield Bucky when he needed him most.

* * *

Bucky rolled up his last clean shirt and packed it into the backpack with the rest of his meager possessions, closed the bag and slung it over his shoulder. He looked out over the rusted basement that had been his home these past weeks, dripping pipes and concrete floor edged with mildew. No better than a tomb, and he Lazarus emerging into the sunlight three days after he had fallen into his stupor. Days spent with images flashing and blinding him as he chewed on his tongue and vomited and screamed and healed so fast that by the time his nightmare memories of so many deaths ended he was whole once more, crusted in dried fluid but clear eyed, staring at the crumbling ceiling.

He let the Winter Soldier wash his body in the freezing shower in the corner, rough perfunctory movements that scraped the dried blood and vomit from his mouth and chest and down the rusted drain. To the Soldier, his body was a tool that needed basic cleaning and tending before it could be used. He let Bucky cut his hair to the shoulders and trim the beard that had grown in the intervening days, the Western Front had taught him how to not look like some kinda caveman even when there wasn’t a mirror.

And when it was all done and he stood naked and raw surrounded by the tatters of his lost memory, he let Patroclus weep. The ancient warrior and lover and veteran of too many battles he had never wanted to see fell to his knees, great, aching sobs torn gasping from his chest, metal fingers clenched in his hair. He cried out against centuries of poison, pouring the pain into tears that burned down his cheeks, as memories settled in his mind of life and death and freezing and killing, of walking the asphodel fields beneath the earth and the yellowed grass above it. He remembered that moments in softly lit caves in a warm bed with Achilles were only the tinest fraction of his life. That the rest was a peaceful boy thrown at the ugliness of the world, a plaything of gods and generals. He had walked back into that trap again and again, eyes open, blinded by the glory of Achilles and Steve and the burning love in his heart that turned his body and soul to ash.

“You will go to him now?” the woman in the corner said. She had watched it all, black dress blending into the shadows, her skin streaked with the green and rust of the mildewed water of the cellar, eyes black as ever and without irises.

“No.” Bucky turned. For the first time in three lives he looked Thetis in the eye. She looked smaller, her unlined face could almost be mistaken for young. She did not loom, she was no shadow more fearsome than any he had known before. Only a mother who had been taken from her people too young, and given to a brutal man and forced to give her golden infant to a brutal world.

She had known all along, and they had been foolish children to ignore her. Had they listened, Achilles would have ascended to a life of bliss three thousand years ago, and Patroclus would have loved and lost and died. He would not come back, no different than any other mortal, soul washed clean to live a new life and perhaps this time do better, as best as any could ever hope. There would be no memory and no Soldier and he would have died on that table when the camp burned.

Death was the curse and privilege of all mortal things, and had Achilles ascended there would have been no Steve to leave alone because he never would have been, and it would have been better. It would have been… he had to believe, had to force himself to believe...

He was no longer afraid of Thetis and he walked to her and she did not retreat or vanish, and her eyes were not hard and challenging. She saw him. They saw each other as no one else ever could, because no one else had been there. They had spoken together as ghosts for untold years and they were still ghosts, the only ones who had ever really known Achilles. Not enemies, only two lost creatures who had tried to speak to one another and had always managed to speak past one another. She, to warn him against immortality and the touch of a god that could only ever burn, and he to show her the softness of her son that she had always pushed to destroy before it could be lost.

 _Your son was not lost_ , he had tried to tell her. _He is here_ , he had tried to tell her, _I carry him in my heart, if you could only see_.

Bucky put a metal hand to her cheek, for he knew she could not abide the touch of anything mortal, that reminder of all Achilles’ father had taken from her with his pawing hands. She did not pull away, but grasped the metal hand with her pale one, black eyes studying him.

“ _I am sorry, mother of my husband_ ,” Patroclus said in the language of the Achaeans, in a dialect of Greek so old that few knew it had ever existed. “I'm sorry he asked you to do this. You were right, you were always right. I chose to follow him. I chose not to understand.”

“He asked for love of you,” she said, her voice no longer so terrible. It cracked and wavered like a mortal’s. “He does. I tried to warn him, but I cannot deny him.”

“I know.” He wanted to kiss her on the cheek, but he knew she would not appreciate the gesture, that unwelcome touch. “Thank you.”

“He does not understand,” Thetis said. “Our gifts are always cruel.”

“You are not cruel, mother,” Patroclus said, and had to blink back tears, salt water blurring his vision as if in tribute to her. “Only wise. You knew it would happen this way from the start. Only children and fools think the wise are cruel for telling the truth.”

“And mortals,” Thetis said, and for the first time she smiled without showing those sharpened teeth, as gentle a smile as a god could offer. “But you are not mortal anymore.”

“I am,” Patroclus said. “I have only lived longer than most, and remembered more than I should.”

“That is all immortality is,” Thetis said, and her dark eyes searched his face. “To never die and never forget is what makes us gods what we are.”

“I can still die,” he said.

Thetis tilted her head, pulling away from the metal palm that felt nothing. “We all can, if we try. The trick is knowing how.”

“You should go to him,” Bucky said. But Thetis's smile turned sad, and for a moment she looked exactly like Steve, back when he had been small, stripped of all power and so all fear. Perhaps she had always been this sad, and he had chosen not to see.

“There is no place for me by his side. He does not know me, and he is mortal though he cannot die. He has not yet learned the trick of it,” Thetis said. “And I do not want to. There is nothing worse than looking into eyes that do not know you. I do not blame him for wishing to banish that from yours.”

“I know you,” Bucky said and she nodded, wet hair sliding over her face as she looked down and away. “Come with me.”

“You are all that remains of my world. The world is new and old and dying, and I am the last of my kind who has known the touch of a mortal. I am alone,” Thetis said. "But I will follow you, for now, little soldier.”

He swallowed. “You can call me that, if you want. But if I can ask…”

She tensed, black eyes flashing with the old, hate-filled wariness of the daughter of the sea. “What?” she said, her voice the rumbling crash of waves.

“May I call you mother?” Bucky said slipping into the Brooklyn drawl of the charmer he had almost forgotten how to be. He offered her a crooked smile. “I never really asked before.”

He did not expect the touch on his face, cold and damp and as light as a raindrop as her cold hands caressed his cheek. “ _Husband of my son_ ,” Thetis said in the old language. “It is your right.”

* * *

They traveled, and she followed where he went. First to Turkey, following the coastline of the Dardanelles to Troy, to the place where he had died. The land has changed, there was a great sweep of fields and cities where there had been none three thousand years ago. The water line was further away.

A model of a horse that he never lived to see sat beyond the gates of the ruins. So much of the city was wrong, the scholars puzzling over how Troy was so much smaller that it should be, than how it was described by the blind poet. But they have only uncovered the barest fraction of the city center. He fought off the urge to tell the scholars crouched in the earthen holes the truth. They would only think he was crazy, and maybe he was.

The hill where the many storied palace of Priam once sat in all its splendid colors had been carved up to build a city for Alexander, another man who thought he was Achilles, and maybe he had been. Bucky didn’t think so. At least the Scaean Gate was still there and he stood beside the stones of the city walls Patroclus never breached and looked out to the rivers and the sea, and the place where he had died.

Thetis stood with him beside the tumbled stones and he felt a cold touch as she slipped her hand into his and for a long while they stood there, silent in the place where they had once spoken. 

He sailed back to Greece, as Patroclus never had, to the temple mount on Delos, to the islands where the Achaean fleet had rested on their way to Troy, and finally to windswept field that was once the land where Patroclus was born and found nothing there. He traveled to the mouth of the Acheron, the door of the Underworld, and they would not take him back, no matter how much of his own blood he spilled at the gate. There was too much river water already in his veins.

He went back to Bucharest.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Do consider leaving a comment, it would mean the world to me <3
> 
> Also, feel free to check me out on [Tumblr](http://www.avelera.tumblr.com)!


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